This invention relates to a textile waste baling system and more particularly to an improved textile waste baling system which economically and efficiently segregates, precompresses and compresses textile waste fibers supplied from a plurality of sources into final bales of uniform size and density.
As is well known in the art to which our invention relates, textile wastes have traditionally been compacted and baled out in very simple baling presses with extensive manual handling of the wastes. Most textile mills have waste rooms where the textile wastes are accumulated in carts or bins. When carts are used, the wastes are usually moved manually from their generating points throughout the mill to the waste room. In recent years, high vacuum air pumps communicating with relatively small diameter pipes have been employed to pneumatically convey the textile wastes from their generating points to the waste room where the waste is drawn by the vacuum pumps into collection tanks mounted over the bins and/or carts. These collection tanks are then intermittently dumped into the carts or bins when they have received a full charge of waste. The wastes are then moved manually in the carts or bins to a waste baling press for final bale out.
Recently, it has been found that exposure to raw cotton dust and fibers can be very detrimental to the health of the personnel handling the textile wastes. Long periods of exposure to such waste can cause respiratory diseases in the form of bysinossis or brown lung which permanently impairs a person's breathing. As a result, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has passed tentative restrictions banning personnel from the direct manual handling of cotton waste. To meet these requirements, conventional pneumatic waste conveying systems have been combined with automatic waste pick-up devices and horizontal balers mounted underneath the collection tanks of pneumatic conveying systems. This type combined system provides a partial answer to the problem of safely collecting textile wastes without any direct manual handling of the cotton fibers. However, most textile mills receive significant amounts for their waste when properly segregated into various groups desired by the consumers of waste. Accordingly, a minimum of three or four segregations of waste will bring significantly higher returns than a mixture of the various wastes. In some cases, it is desirable to segregate as many as ten or twelve wastes for optimum resale value of the waste.
With conventional pneumatic conveying systems combined with horizontal balers, a large capital investment is required to segregate wastes because a separate horizontal baler is needed for each different type of waste collected. Also, horizontal balers require a relatively large floor space and when a plurality of wastes are collected, floor space becomes an important factor. Furthermore, horizontal balers do not produce as desirable a bale as the traditional vertical balers employed with manually operated waste collecting systems. Another disadvantage in horizontal balers is that some automated bale plucking systems used by the consumers of waste require the bales handled by such systems to be of a uniform size and density and that they be stable on their bases. They also require that such bales do not expand excessively in height when released to their ties. Bales made with horizontal balers generally do not meet these requirements.
A still further disadvantage in the use of horizontal balers is that the inlets to such balers are normally much smaller than the conduits of the waste conveying system that discharges the waste into the baler. This requires expensive, elevated hoppers between the large outlets of the waste conveying system and the inlets to the balers. Accordingly, conventional pneumatic conveying systems combined with horizontal baling systems must be installed in buildings with very high ceilings.